"We bought a wonderful sample library from a piano in Chernobyl that someone had found in the Forbidden Zone. Someone went there and made a sample library from that old piano. So we bought that one and used it," via Arc Raiders' YouTube channel.
Arc Raiders has a terrific soundscape, although it can sometimes be hard to hear it when you're getting hunted down by your fellow players or bloodthirsty arcs. The game is quite quiet, aside from the occasional sound of distant gunfire, the clicks and cracks from small roaming arcs, and the noise of shuffling scrap as raiders sort through abandoned buildings for valuable items. But perhaps the best noise in all of Arc Raiders comes from the few instruments raiders can find amid the rubble.
"One of the gameplay designers, really early on, made a trumpet," Pajor says. "And it was so out of place, and we were like 'why are we making it?'" The musical items in Arc Raiders serve multiple purposes. There's the social incentive to play an instrument, to bond with strangers and just show them that you're a harmless, relatively chill dude. But there's also the strategic purpose of using noises to lure arcs. Perhaps you're herding them into a trap or ambush or maybe you're trying to distract the aggro of one arc away from another vulnerable player.
Avid players of Arc Raiders will notice, however, that there's no trumpet available in game. Well that's because the trumpet eventually became what we now know as the lure grenade. Apparently a playable trumpet was just too silly to the devs at first, so they settled on something a bit more useful. But now, over a year later from launch players can enjoy multiple instruments like the piano, guitar, harmonica, flute, banjo, recorder, and the trusty shaker.
"It's been almost seven years of exploring this world. [Composers Patrik Andrén and Johan Söderqvist] used to be performing musicians before they became composers so they have a lot of friends who are Sweden's best jazz musicians," Pajor adds. "So a lot of the sounds in the game are quite unique because they are making the sound libraries.
"It's their commitment to building a world; they're phenomenal world builders. So eager to understand what the game is and what the world is. They are also very demanding to work with, because they have so many ideas."
Aside from the Chernobyl piano, which is certainly one of the stranger sources of music I've heard of, composers Andrén and Söderqvist are also known for their abstract use of everyday items to make music and noises.
A lot of raw synthesisers are used to create arc-adjacent noises, but they've also hooked up different kinds of fruits to a synthesiser to grab some slightly weirder sounds. All in all, out of a three hour recording session there's usually only three minutes of usable sounds, "because it's sheer weirdness" but those three minutes "are really really really cool", Söderqvist adds, and stresses that you simply can't obtain these fantastically strange sounds another way.
